1174 Woolf, Virginia
wooLF, virGiNia To the Lighthouse
(1927)
Considered one of the most important modern-
ist novels, To the Lighthouse is perceived by many
critics as Virginia Woolf ’s masterpiece due to its
complex employment of stream-of-consciousness
techniques and for its particular temporal structure.
The novel is divided into three parts—“The Win-
dow,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse”—which
narrate three moments in the life of the Ramsay
family. The first section, which takes place on one
day, sees the family at the summer house on the
Isle of Skye, planning a trip to the lighthouse for
the following day. Around this event are condensed
the actions and feelings of the characters: the family
(Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their children Andrew,
Prue, James, and Cam) and the friends staying with
them (the painter Lily Briscoe, the poet Charles
Tansley, and the intellectual August Charmichael).
“Time Passes” narrates, from an impersonal point
of view, the dramatic events occurring in the 10
years dividing the first and the second section: Mrs.
Ramsay and Prue die and Andrew is killed during
World War I. “The Lighthouse” is set again on one
single day and focuses on Lily Briscoe, who comes
back to the house and faces her grief over the loss
of her beloved friends. A long and difficult artistic
process eventually leads her to the completion of the
painting that she had started 10 years earlier, which
recreates and fixes, in her perception, the lost atmo-
sphere and feelings of that initial day.
Teresa Prudente
deatH in To the Lighthouse
Death plays a central role in To the Lighthouse,
starting from the autobiographical matrix of the
text, which was written by Woolf with the intent of
portraying the beloved and lost figures of her father
and mother (her mother died when she was 13 and
her father when she was 22).
The second and third parts of the novel deal spe-
cifically with the grief caused by death, but already
in the first section there are many anticipations of
the theme. Mrs. Ramsay, the character whom Woolf
modeled on her mother, simultaneously experiences
states of intense ecstatic perception and feelings of
frightening emptiness. At the beginning of chapter
3, Mrs. Ramsay, while reading, is kept in a reassur-
ing state of peace in hearing, in the background, the
murmur of her friends’ and relatives’ voices talking,
but when this ceases, she experiences a feeling of
terror, which makes her perceive the flowing of time
and how “it was all ephemeral as a rainbow.” This
awareness of the transitory character of life works as
a premonition by anticipating Mrs. Ramsay’s death
in the following sections and by underlining the
evanescent quality of the happiness that both she
and the other characters experience. While enjoying
moments of rapture and deep closeness with her
family and friends, Mrs. Ramsay is conscious that is
all destined to end, and she hopes that the beauty of
these moments will, nevertheless, “endure” and that
her sons “Paul and Minta would carry it on when
she was dead.”
The second section of the novel, “Time Passes,”
shifts the focus of the narration from the characters’
consciousnesses to the more impersonal exploration
of the house where the action in section 1 has taken
place. The whole section is centered on the idea of
the ineluctable flowing of time. This idea is high-
lighted by the contrast of the enduring quality of the
house (“whatever else may perish and disappear, what
lies here is steadfast” with the ephemerality of human
life. In the 10 years following the day narrated in
“The Window,” three of the characters of section 1
die (one of them perishing in World War I), and the
house seems to follow the destiny of its inhabitants
by gradually reflecting an increasing emptiness. The
death of Mrs. Ramsay, in particular, leaves a huge
void in the house. In the past, she had acted as the
center of the group residing there, by holding the
components together and by creating around herself
a particular atmosphere.
Finally, section 3 deals directly with the emp-
tiness and pain caused by death. Lily Briscoe, a
painter who used to be an intimate friend of Mrs.
Ramsay, comes back to the house on the island and
finds both the place and the persons much changed
by the loss and devastation experienced in the past
10 years. Lily is overwhelmed by a feeling of emp-
tiness and uselessness. “How aimless it was, how
chaotic, how unreal,” she thinks as she reflects on
the disappearance of all the emotions and events
that animated one particular day in the past (the one